Tom Cruise is quite used to popping up in movie theaters with his popcorn, supporting the latest blockbuster and, on the weekends, hanging off helicopters and flying planes. But before he became Hollywood’s most committed human special effect, Cruise was — and remains — one hell of an actor. Magnolia, Collateral, Born on the Fourth of July and Jerry Maguire all demonstrated sides of Cruise that Ethan Hunt rarely gets an opportunity to access. Thankfully, it sounds like he’s still planning to remind everyone exactly what he can do with his next R-rated movie.
Cruise’s mysterious R-rated project with Christopher McQuarrie, affectionately known as “The Gnarly Movie,” has received an exciting new update from screenwriter Erik Jendresen. Speaking with Collider’s Meredith Loftus at Televerse, a festival by the Television Academy, Jendresen confirmed that a script has been completed. He told Collider:
“There is no update to report yet, but the script is finished, and it’s sitting there, and it’s, I guess, some of the track that’s been laid down in front of Tom. So we’ll see what happens.”
Back in 2023, while discussing Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning with Empire, McQuarrie revealed that he and Jendresen had already developed the screenplay together. “There’s a movie that Cruise and I are talking about doing next or in some probable next, that Erik and I developed together – what has been referred to on the internet as ‘The Gnarly Movie’.” McQuarrie then offered the description that has kept the mysterious project alive in the minds of Cruise fans ever since: “It’s that movie that they’re all asking for, and that we want to do.”
“The Gnarly Movie” Is Unlike Any Other Tom Cruise Movie
The project actually stretches even further back. While discussing Jack Reacher with Empire in 2020, McQuarrie acknowledged that the Cruise-led adaptation could arguably have embraced the harder violence of Lee Child’s novels and become an R-rated franchise. But rather than retroactively changing Reacher, McQuarrie revealed that he and Cruise were developing something else intended to scratch that particular itch. Most intriguingly, the filmmaker described its central role as a “very un-Tom character.”
Cruise knows how to thrill an audience, but once upon a time, his filmography regularly bounced between gigantic crowd-pleasers and complicated dramas from directors like Stanley Kubrick, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Michael Mann. Collateral might remain the clearest example of what an R-rated Cruise project could offer. His chilling performance as silver-haired contract killer Vincent completely weaponized the charisma audiences associated with the actor, earning some of the strongest reviews of his career in the process. And we want more.
The untitled R-rated project does not yet have a release date.
via Collider